Julianne Moore revels in chance to work with Meirelles in 'Blindness'

Wednesday

Sep 24, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 24, 2008 at 9:17 PM

All it took for Julianne Moore to say yes to taking a part in the film “Blindness,” based on Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel, was a call from her agent telling her that Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles was offering her his next movie.

Ed Symkus

All it took for Julianne Moore to say yes to taking a part in the film “Blindness,” based on Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel, was a call from her agent telling her that Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles was offering her his next movie.

“I’m such a fan of his that I would have done anything,” she says, clasping her hands at the ends of her heavily freckled arms. “I loved ‘City of God’ and ‘The Constant Gardener.’ I had no idea it was for this film, and I didn’t know the book. So I read it and I thought, ‘This material is insane! It was great!’ I just got kind of doubly lucky that it was him with this material.”

In “Blindness,” Moore, who is spot-on in hard-hitting drama (“Boogie Nights,” “Savage Grace”) as well as comedy (“Laws of Attraction,” “The Big Lebowski”), gets to revisit the kind of psychological horror she played in an early film, “Safe.” Here, she’s one of an ensemble of nameless characters, each of whom — with the exception of her — has gone blind due to an unexplained worldwide virus. When government officials start putting sightless victims under quarantine, she, though sighted, sticks with her blind husband (Mark Ruffalo) and unwittingly becomes, as the script suggests in one of its very few light moments, “a leader with vision.”

“This movie’s not an action film,” she says. “It’s not a film where there’s a hero who saves the day. This is a film about behavior, within catastrophe, and how we react. This isn’t something traditional where someone comes in and kills the bad guy and then says, ‘Now we can all live peacefully.’ ”

Indeed, this is a thought-provoking story about society in a downward tailspin, with dark behavior and evil thoughts rising up and forming battle lines with others who remain basically good. One scene in particular, taking place within the quarantined wards of an abandoned mental hospital, pits a blind, self-proclaimed anarchic leader (Gael Garcia Bernal) against the heroic protagonists when he and his minions commandeer food supplies and demand women in exchange for sustenance. It turns out to be a demand the helpless, starving inmates can’t refuse. The resulting sequence, shot in dim light and accompanied more by silence than sound, is tough to watch but fascinating.

“I think it’s an important thing to see,” Moore says of the scene. “It’s a violent crime; it’s a crime of war, a crime of power. Someone asked me, ‘What’s the basic difference between men and women?’ I said, ‘Well, men are stronger than women. That’s the basic difference.’ If that weren’t the case, then rape wouldn’t happen. It happens because men are physically stronger. We instill this idea that only bad people do it or it only happens if somebody is aberrant. But it happens routinely, in war, and that’s kind of what this is. Yes, it’s disturbing to watch, but there’s something about hearing people’s voices and hearing normal sounds during the scene. It lacks theatricality. You think, ‘How come no one is screaming?’ It’s just quiet, and it’s horrific.”

Yet having recently watched the film for the first time, she admits that she probably wasn’t as caught up in that scene — or any other scenes — as most audiences will be.

“I wish I could be,” she says of watching her own films. “You see your mistakes a lot, and you see other people. There are certain things that really move you. But I don’t know that you’re ever absent from the equation when you watch one of your own movies, which is why it’s not fun to watch your own movies. It’s never fun. It’s fun to watch somebody else’s movies. Then you can lose yourself in the experience, and have something happen to you.”

But did making this film, acting in something that’s so much about the human condition, change her in any way? Did it make her look at the world in a different light?

“I feel fortunate that I work in a place where I’m in touch with that stuff all the time,” she says. “It’s very easy to stop thinking about things and get caught up in it. But movies are always exploring these different kinds of emotional dynamics. And as actors, we’re forced to explore them. Because of that, I’d like to think that it helps keep me more conscious. Otherwise, why would you do it? Because you’re chasing fame? That would be a horrible thing.”

“Blindness” opens Oct. 3.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.

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